The Highest Tide: A Novel

by Jim Lynch

  What distracted me, though, were the two pickups parked in the back gravel lot. They appeared to be moving, not backward or forward, but bucking on their shocks. By the time I glanced at the motorcycles again, they were toppling into each other in an avalanche of glinting chrome.

  I started attempting to point all this out to the judge when I saw the telephone lines undulating like whips and steel light posts swaying like rubber tubes. “Judge!” I slowed the boat and pointed wildly at the tavern as it began its own left-right shimmy and spat leathered longhairs out its front door. The trucks continued bouncing so wildly we heard their shocks groan. The judge saw my stricken confusion, grabbed the wheel and explained in one word what was happening.

  You can’t feel an earthquake when you’re on water unless it’s big enough to trigger a freak wave, but even then you might not think earthquake unless you could see what I was seeing.

  I pointed at the wobbling Heron bridge, the shaking tree limbs, the dinghies rubbing against the tavern’s tiny floating dock. Dogs barked, the sky fluttered with agitated birds and someone shouted instructions across the bay. The next thing I saw made me think the earth was coming apart for real: Mud fountains sprang out of the tavern parking lot and out of the sidewalk leading to the bridge. This all carried on for what felt like five minutes. The experts later said the whole thing lasted thirty-four seconds.

  “Florence!” I shouted once the trembling stopped.

  The judge sped toward her cabin, picking a reckless route through the shallows. I braced for impact, but said nothing, even after the prop struck the mud twice. As we passed my house, I noticed that our front stilts appeared to still be doing their job. Amazingly, nothing looked out of place. The judge’s house loomed as impressively as ever on the knoll. Even Florence’s rickety cabin was still in its spot when we beached the Whaler and jogged toward it across thousands of broken shells.

  Opening Florence’s door required the judge’s shoulder because so many books had spilled behind it. He gasped at the mess, but I could see it wasn’t so bad. Three bookcases had collapsed. The rest of the clutter was just slightly worse than usual with the dust from old hardbacks whirled into slow-motion tornadoes.

  She was in her chair, head tilted back, a washcloth and a bag of ice in her lap. She looked alarmed to see us, as if we’d come to kidnap her. She also didn’t look like herself as a result of her nose being twice as large as normal.

  “Florence!” the judge cried. “You hurt yourself!”

  She shook her head, her eyes reflecting so many lights they looked like kaleidoscopes. “No, Norman, I didn’t ‘hurt myself,’ but I’m considering filing charges against Mother Earth.”

  “We’ll get you to the ER and get that looked at right away,” he promised.

  “No, you certainly won’t.” Her voice was a tight whistle. “Dr. Pendergast is making a house call. Thank you for your concern, Norman, but I’ll be fine, just a little less glamorous than usual.”

  The judge’s cheeks collapsed, as if she’d sucked his authority right out of him. “That was a doozer, wasn’t it?” he said finally.

  She sighed. “Shook this little house like it wanted to break it.”

  “Your stilts look okay.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “But they should definitely be checked by an inspector.”

  I started picking up books: Psychonavigation, Creative Visualization, Dream Mail.

  “Well, I’ll be sure to do that, Norman.”

  The judge then, for whatever reason, gave her the play-by-play of our day—our four-oyster ritual, the dancing telephone lines, the motorcycle dominoes and the mud fountains. Take away his voice and he sounded like any boy in need of attention.

  “Thank you for sharing, Norman. Now go check on your house and the others—and quit looking at my goddamn nose. I’ll be fine here if Miles is kind enough to help me get my books back to a more familiar disorder.”

  The judge didn’t know where to rest his eyes. “I’d be happy to drive—”

  “Shoo!” she said. “The doctor is on his way.”

  “There might be aftershocks,” the judge warned, then sneezed.

  “No there won’t,” she said.

  The judge sniffled, then mumbled a few uncharacteristic well-well-wells. “It’s not too hot in here for you?” When she didn’t respond, he told her to call if she needed anything, then left us in the wake of his shrinking voice.

  That’s why he’d thanked me for visiting her, I thought. Florence is way too much for him.

  “The earthquake had nothing to do with your nose,” I said, without looking up from the books I was stacking: Spirit of the Witch, Destiny of Souls, Miracles Do Happen.

  “How do you know?” she asked. A test, not a denial.

  “Your ice is already half-melted,” I said. “Your scratch is scabbing. And your black eyes are yellowing. Do you want these in any particular order?”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t dote on me, Miles. Go check on your own house.”

  I ignored her and sorted titles into whatever piles made sense, creating an aisle for her to shuffle through. Psychic Wars, Numerology Secrets, Tantra: The Art of Conscious Loving. I stared up at her lopsided face and tried to imagine what Sophia Loren looked like. “That doctor isn’t coming, is he?”

  “That was the biggest quake in forty years,” she said. “That’s what they’ll say.”

  I reflexively glanced around for a television or a radio before remembering she had neither. She didn’t want big business hypnotizing her: Everything’s better with Coke was her favorite example. Grab life by the horns: Get yourself into a Dodge was another.

  “So,” I repeated, “the doc’s not coming, right?”

  “You might find me much worse than this someday, Miles. Are you prepared for that?”

  “Is he coming?”

  Her voice climbed. “There’s nothing anyone can do for a broken nose other than tell you to ice it and try not to bang the stupid thing again. Answer my question, Miles.”

  I kept stacking.

  “Miles?”

  “I’m prepared to find you walking around your house without fear of falling.”

  She snorted. “If I’m supposed to sugarcoat things for you more than I already do, forgive me for overestimating your maturity. Didn’t you read what I gave you? Look up the word degenerative!”

  I was speechless. She’d never scolded me before. What she had wasn’t actually Parkinson’s, but some other neurological freak-out with a long crazy name meant to describe her brain’s diminishing ability to tell her body what to do. Her right side would continue to stiffen, the articles predicted, and then her left side would soon do the same. Eventually, she wouldn’t be able to move or swallow. It was like watching the Tin Man rust.

  Nobody knew how anyone got it, but Florence had her theories. Car exhaust and hamburgers were her favorites.

  “It’s okay,” she added after a deep breath. “Nobody’s counting on this spinster—not even a goddamn cat.”

  “Right,” I snapped. “Rachel Carson never married either, but the whole planet missed her, including the nephew she’d adopted.”

  I finished stacking the books and didn’t respond to any more questions. I left one of the fallen bookcases on its side, partly because it was too heavy to maneuver, partly out of protest. Then I banged out some ice, stuffed the cubes in a bag, slammed it on the counter three times and brought it to her.

  I asked, in a demanding voice, if she’d been taking the pills her neurologist, a guy named Dr. Pack—which struck me as way too close to Dr. Quack—prescribed.

  “They make me groggy,” she mumbled.

  I found the Sinamet and Mirapex in the bathroom and set them and a glass of water on her cluttered chairside table. “You should take them,” I said, tapping out two tiny pills from each vial.

  “How’d you know?” I asked, finally getting around to it, although I was still furious. “You told me ‘something big’ was gonn
a happen on the bay. Was it a voice? A feeling? Did you know it was gonna be an earthquake? Was it a guess?”

  She didn’t hide her disappointment in me. “I don’t guess.”

  “Then what?”

  “Don’t push.”

  “I share everything with you.”

  Smiling looked like it hurt. “It’s not that it’s a secret, Miles. It’s that it’s fragile. It’s like holding any image in your head. If you try too hard you lose it. The last time I talked about it too much I lost it for a long time. I can’t risk that again.”

  Within an hour, I learned that the Capitale Apartments, the construction of which Florence had warned against, were so damaged by the quake that the county was likely to condemn them.

  Chapter 17

  The O’Malley house looked as if it had hopped up and down and landed on the same high wire. Three beer steins had rattled off the shelf and two candles lay on the carpet, but beyond that it just looked like it did right before my mother started yelling at us to pick up after ourselves. After calling my parents and reassuring them that the house and I were fine, I bicycled into the city to see as much as I could see.

  Most of downtown was built as if it didn’t expect to be there long. While Seattle built into the sky, Olympia stayed limbo low, perhaps because nobody wanted to throw too much money into buildings that sat just three feet above the highest waters, or perhaps because nobody was allowed to put up anything that pulled people’s eyes off the sandstone capitol, built on sturdy higher ground to give it prominence as well as protection against a freak wave or record tide. And that’s where we all rushed to gauge the worst of what the earthquake could do to us.

  What I found was a stiff-necked mob gawking at a startlingly visible crack in one of the four-foot-wide pillars holding up the dome. People stared big-eyed at the flaw, as if they’d witnessed the cracking of the Liberty Bell. I rode around the building looking for other damage that maybe only I could see, then gave up and coasted down Columbia Street to the Capitale Apartments where some of its walls had shifted more than a foot and the penthouse had collapsed into an elevator shaft. I watched police stretch yellow tape across its entrance and firemen shuttle in and out. I wanted to shout I told you so! for Florence. I looked at everything twice so that I could describe it perfectly for her, then I rode on, surrounded by breathless, chatty strangers filling the parks, streets and alleys with their astonishment. I overheard the same numbers over and over: Six-point-eight! Six-point-eight! And the warning: There may be aftershocks.

  News arrived in bursts and spread by mouth. The exact same earthquake had crumbled Seattle’s oldest brick neighborhood and shoved seven Tacoma houses into the Sound. Airports closed, Highway 101 caved into Hood Canal and 230,000 households were suddenly unplugged. A total of eighty-three buildings were ultimately taped off in Seattle, another thirty-two in Olympia where the Deschutes Parkway looked as if it’d been riddled by meteorites. Even cities as far away as Portland and Spokane vibrated enough to crack windows. Yet despite all the wreckage and more than four hundred reported injuries, not a single person died at the will of that quake.

  The sunset that night was a long blackberry stain beyond the hills behind our bay. People lingered outside, exclaiming, sharing, testifying, as if we’d survived a bombing raid together.

  For once, everyone had a story.

  My mother’s was that she’d apologized for being so fat after her friend’s Fiat started bouncing when she climbed inside it. My father said a friend of a friend was getting a vasectomy—which had to be explained to me twice—when the quake hit. That story was enough to double over my mother and make my father groan and grab his crotch. Then Phelps called to tell me that he’d been stealing some Kents when the entire fucking carton started shaking and spilling packs onto his parents’ bedroom floor. He asked me how many people I thought were having sex when the quake hit. “Hundreds? Thousands?” Angie Stegner’s story was that she’d slept through the whole dang thing.

  By the time we finished sharing tales and inspecting our houses, a bearded University of Washington seismologist was on every channel asserting that the epicenter was in the Olympia area.

  “More specifically,” he said, pointing at a South Sound map, “it appears this earthquake originated about twenty-three miles beneath Skookumchuck Bay.” That put a shiver through me. No wonder Florence knew.

  The seismologist called it the biggest quake in the Northwest since Alaska’s 1964 whopper that killed 125 people and triggered a two-hundred-foot tidal wave. He called our earthquake a gentle giant by comparison, considering, he said, that it, amazingly, killed nobody.

  It shook us just long enough and hard enough to make us feel helpless, I thought, and just short enough and mercifully enough not to kill us. But it wasn’t until I heard what happened to my school that I started thinking about the choices the earth made.

  Overhead lights had crashed onto dozens of desks, but Mrs. Guthrie’s portable classroom actually fell off its blocks and split in two, as if struck by a huge axe. The Ice Queen didn’t smile once during the 181 days of my fourth grade. So why was her classroom singled out? Or what about the stretch of crumbled chimneys the quake left behind on just one side of Jefferson Avenue? And why did the brand-new fake fountain at the entrance to Sunset Estates crack all the way through?

  Reporters, photographers and television vans wheeled up to the bay soon after it was hailed as the epicenter, just in case there were aftershocks or the bay itself released a formal statement.

  We continued to flip between newscasts until a red-faced man told us what I’d been waiting to hear. “KING Five has learned that more than a decade ago an elderly woman, who used to give psychic readings in Olympia, predicted that the then-proposed Capitale Apartments would be particularly vulnerable to an earthquake if it was constructed. Well, it was indeed built and today it was as seriously damaged as any major structure in Olympia. KING Five’s efforts to reach Florence Dalessandro for comment have been unsuccessful so far.”

  Soon one van, then two more, and finally eight people on foot sped down Florence’s gravel.

  There were no lights on, and the urgent knocks went unanswered. What they got instead of old Florence was Judge Stegner swaggering into the clearing in charcoal slacks and black suspenders to cheerfully announce: “Fortunately for Flo’s sake, she isn’t home right now. She’s at a friend’s house. And no, I’m not going to tell you which friend or exactly where she is. Florence has asked me, however, to tell you that she won’t have any comment for public consumption on this or any other matter, but sincerely thanks you for your interest.”

  The judge then rattled on in front of the cameras in Florence’s driveway, commenting that he’d never expected little Skookumchuck Bay to become the center of any universe. He kept mentioning the squid discovery, as if it’d just occurred, and observed that seismologists hadn’t been aware of any fault line in the immediate area. “So either the fault is different than previously mapped, or perhaps we’ve discovered a new fault altogether,” he said, as if he were heading up the investigation.

  I watched from a safe distance as the judge milked attention. It was easy to forget that he wasn’t the psychic who’d warned about the construction of that apartment building in the first place.

  More than a dozen people took frantic notes. Behind them, others rehearsed in front of a bank of cameras, stressing that they were live at Skookumchuck Bay. “I’m standing in front of the home of Florence Dalessandro, the Olympia psychic who predicted in 1989 that the Capitale Apartments would be destroyed in an earthquake . . . We ready?”

  I pictured Florence waiting it out in her chair without any temptation to answer the door or hear the details about her news-making cameo. I put a sign on her door the next morning that said she wasn’t home and had no comment, but a Tacoma reporter eventually got inside with a knock that sounded like mine. He described her menagerie of books and her swollen nose. He got all that right, but he couldn’t coax mor
e than two sentences out of her: “I’m glad nobody died in those apartments. And that’s all I have to say.” It seemed like a crumb of news, but it landed in the paper and might have had something to do with the visit Florence later received from a state case worker.

  At least that’s the way I remember it. Time was jumping around on me again. The day of the quake itself felt like a week, and it still doesn’t sound possible that I ate raw oysters with the judge during the same twelve hours that included that first visit from the cult.

  When we heard the knock at nine-thirty we assumed it was another chatty neighbor, but my mother opened the door to strangers—a tall older lady and a stumpy, lipless man in a tie. The lady apologized for calling on us so late, then explained that they were members of a community school that hoped to speak to Miles O’Malley.

  “Which school?” Mom demanded.

  “We’re with the Eleusinian School,” the lady said gently. “We’d just like to talk to your son, if that’s okay with you.”

  “You’re with the cult?” Mom half-shouted, then laughed so abruptly the lady flinched. “I’m sorry, but my son won’t be talking to any cults today. Thank you very much.”

  “We’re not a cult,” the lady patiently explained. “We’re not a religion either. We’re students at a school.” The open door sucked wind and her soapy perfume into our house. “And our teacher is interested, with your permission, in conversing with your son.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, she saw the television special on him, ma’am, and she simply wants to be open to the possibility that he is tuning in to the natural world in ways most of us aren’t. And then with today’s earthquake right here and all, she just wanted us to say hello, and to let you and Miles know that we’d like to open a dialogue, if that’s okay.”

  My mother’s laugh was cold. “We’re not interested in our son being part of your freak show. No thank you very much.” She shut the door and vibrated her lips, then congratulated herself for telling the cult to shove it. Finally, she looked at me. “You didn’t want to talk to them, did you?”